Cardan Grilles: A Solution

In my last post, I challenged the reader to fill out this letter grid…

…so that no matter how the Cardan grille below is placed on top of it, the letters showing through the holes would spell out a word.

Combining the word sense that comes from years of crossword-solving and a bit of math, I found my own solution.

The bare letter grid is here:

You’ll notice the subsquare of E’s in the middle. The geometry of the grille put those blocks in the middle of most would-be words, and the geometry of the English lexicon told me that E’s in those blocks would make my job easy. (From there, filling out the edges was rather elementary.) Was that decision timid, artless, gutless, amateurish? Absolutely. If you’ve got a better solution — with some consonants in the middle, or at least not so blasted many E’s — I invite you to share it.